Building the Numbers

Successful companies qualify well and sell to their strengths. Struggling companies don’t.

The business to business sales experience is under pressure from scarcity of buyer time, burgeoning online information, and shoals of lookalike competition.

Buyers consistently report that their experience in the sales process is more important to purchasing decisions than the product or service.

But all too often, the seller’s experience is of sweating out that ‘compelling value proposition’ in the heat of a campaign and on thin information – and puzzling why it’s always such a scramble to recreate those set pieces that convey why prospects should buy from them over anyone else.

Although most companies talk reverently about customer experience, buying cycles and relationships, they tend to do so intermittently when in ‘mountaintop mode’ (periodic customer surveys, planning sessions, company gatherings) and their everyday ‘market mode’ looks somewhat different; marketing, sales and service busily acting as separate unaligned entities with different goals, viewpoints and measures of success.

Clients tell us they sell most successfully when they find ways to make vision, values and strategy ‘live’ on the front line and propagate naturally. That calls for some hard work in decision making and then producing clear messages, a repository of reusable templates and models, accessible tools and supportive guidance. We call that story building. This approach also encourages a dynamic multi-way exchange so that sales dialogues keep to strategic principles but are enlivened by fresh information, experience and insight. Goodbye inquisitional reviews and dispiriting wall chart reminders.

Story building for sales – where we can help:

Sales organisation design - recruiting, training, coaching the right people